Stuck In The Middle Review
columnist: Scott from Oregon

Topic: Political Parties
Ron Paul, John McCain, And A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On...

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The Republican Party, once again, confounds me with the hyposcrisy it seems to embrace...

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by Scott from Oregon
(Libertarian)
Monday, May 5, 2008

I often hear the expressions "the evils of liberalism", or "the disease of liberalism" and it is often in the context of threats to shoot people who want society to be a more peaceful and artful place. Sometimes, it is cached in religious fanaticism, strewn amongst declarations of a god deciding and/or pre-deciding everything in accordance with chapter and verse whatever... Sometimes, the "god given right to shoot people" is used as a sort of double whammy approach to dealing with "the other half" of the population, (and in that nutshell, lies the nut).

For most of my adult life, the Republican party has been a rather odd and unintelligible entity. It is the party that supposedly stands for "family values", with a base whose families are no more statistically "valuable" than its proclaimed liberal nemeses. Divorce, unwed mothers, abuse, broken homes etc... all seem to occur in Republican households at about the same rate as Liberal households. In the upper echelons of the party, you get all sorts of incidences of "family value" disparagements (hookers, affairs, gay trysts, you name it) and yet the proclamation of "family values" is continually made at election time, and by god, people actually believe it.

The Republican Party is the self-proclaimed party of "great morals". The stalwart upholders of modern morality. The party of honor and patriotism... of god and country. Ask a die hard Republican and he/she will probably tell you that they represent what is best in America, while those damn liberals represent what is worst.

Look around you this election season. Ask yourself-- "Is this all really true?"

Less than a year ago, I mentally and then formally joined the Republican party. One of its members, Congressman Ron Paul, was making a lot of sense to me, both historically and personally. He was standing bravely for some very old and cherished ideals, and I agreed with many of them. In a nutshell, what he said was that the federal government was not intended to be the enormity that it is today, and that in its enormity, it had become a monstrosity, and in the manner of monsters it had become preoccupied with its own power and survival, requiring constant feeding and growth and relevance. The federal government had grown itself into something We The People don't necessarily want or need.

Ron Paul stepped up and simply stated that that was not the original intent of the founders and framers of this great country. In fact, it was what they feared would happen and tried to prevent. What he believed and voted on for ten Congressional terms, was that America was made great and prosperous because people had liberty. America was great because Americans were not top-down controlled by a massive central state. Individuals had rights and local communities had rights and states had rights as well. Power bubbled upward, and was located in the hearts and minds of each American, as an individual.

OK. I agreed with this ideological perspective and believed it to be the original intent of the first true Americans, the founders who gathered to create this great experiment we call the United States. And apparently, in a two party system such as we have these days, the Republican party was supposedly more closely aligned with these notions of "smaller government" etc..  and that was why you found Ron Paul running as a Republican.

But here is the rub. Ron Paul is a pariah in his own party. The Republican party is marginalizing the very notions that the Republican party once stood for. The party itself is ignoring the Constitution, disregarding its own ideological history, and behaving both immorally and without honor and without a love of individual liberty and country. The Republican party has become its own monstrosity, a monster preoccupied with its own survival and its own agenda and its own needs and desires for power and prestige and control. The Republican party has become just like the federal government, a large, self-appointed repository of power, completely separated from the intent of the original founders and framers, a place where bubble-up from the people power is overrun by top-down directive and control. It has become an evil, un-American power network infected with the same willful hubris that it once claimed to oppose. It is in it for itself, and not for the American people. It is hypocrisy wrapped in hypocrisy, covered in hypocrisy and submerged in a sea of hypocrisy.

I never understood the claims of the Republican party as its representatives stood at podiums and made their declarations. I never understood the mindset that floated the party quite often to the presidency. From my political birth in the eighties (that gosh darn one semester of liberal college professors teaching me English and Social Science) to the present day (filled with Blitzer and Dobbs and all of the other talking heads), I am still greatly confused by the Republican party and what it stands for. It hasn't acted like the animal it used to claim to be. It isn't full of love of liberty and freedom. It treats its members not like family with value, but like heads of cattle. The Republican party isn't even moral!

As a new member of the Republican party, I can testify that the only prominent member of its party that I know of that behaves in the manner of the party's podium-proclamations is Congressman Ron Paul, and yet the party does its best to disassociate itself from him. John McCain behaves as if Paul doesn't exist at all. Party leaders in precincts across America want the ideas of smaller government and liberty to simply go away. Bubble-up power distribution and the will of the people is no longer on the radar of the Republican elite. Gone are the ideas of the founders and framers. Gone are the ideas of individual liberties, personal responsibility, swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution and actually obeying that oath-- the great ideas that made America great.

Odd, this Republican party. Very odd.

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2008 Scott from Oregon, all rights reserved.
Published: Monday, May 5, 2008
Last modified: Monday, May 5, 2008

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